The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.
Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.
I am on a really tight budget so I really don’t want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.
I don’t expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.
In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.
Possibilites I came up with until now:
- Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
- Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.
I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!
Use zfs. Use RAID-suitable (TLER) drives which limit retries before reporting failure. Use stripe over mirror pools (RAID10 equivalent). Buy a spare in advance. Hot spares are immediately starting rebuilding after failure. Scrub regularly (crontab). Always remember: RAID is not a backup.
I think there are too many technical words I don’t understand yet in this comment, but thanks nonetheless. One I want to ask specifically tough, is a hot spare a disk mirrored every now and then or what do you mean by that?